International Worker’s Day seems as good a day as any for a Billy Bragg gig. Around 5,000 Londoners seemed to agree and headed to the Apollo on a grey and rainy evening to see the man from Barking sing about life, love and politics. (more…)
Protest Songs
Politics in music wrap – 1 April 2014
Contrasting approaches to the protest song, from Pharrell to Pussy Riot
Another example for the ‘things just ain’t what they used to be’ file this week: Jimmy Buff wrote in the Poughkeepsie Journal (one of New York State’s oldest newspapers, apparently) that the next generation of musicians need to step up to write some environmental protest songs. I’ve written about this kind of thing at length elsewhere on this blog so won’t go over it all again here, other than to say that trawling today’s charts for examples of the type of songs that were written in previous eras doesn’t make much sense, given that times, and politics, change. Should we really expect musicians today to approach issues in exactly the same way that they musicians in previous eras did?
Politics in music wrap – 18 March 2014
Music and Manus Island
The big news in Australian music this week surrounded the release of Urthboy’s new song ‘Don’t Let It Go‘ in response to recent events related to the Australian Government’s asylum seeker policy (the song can be downloaded for free here). The Sydney Morning Herald covered it in the wake of the death of an asylum seeker in an offshore detention centre on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Manus Island has been at the centre of the Abbott Government’s controversial ‘Operation Sovereign Borders Policy‘, which involves the use of the Australian military to prevent asylum seekers from entering Australian territory and seeking asylum. Interestingly, the story about Urthboy’s new track was covered not by a music reporter, but by the paper’s Immigration Correspondent. Who says that music and politics don’t mix?
“Where are all the protest songs?” (Part III)
The 1960s today
Bob Dylan hasn’t written a political folk song for decades and Pete Seeger passed away, aged 94, earlier this year. The 1960s protest song era has well and truly passed, but it has certainly not been forgotten.
“Where are all the protest songs?” (Part II)
Was popular music all that political in the 1960s?
The question “where are all the protest songs?” often has its basis in a comparison with the 1960s, as I discussed in Part I of this series. The decade is widely remembered for its major social movements, including civil rights, peace, and women’s liberation. It was a tumultuous and exciting era for progressive politics, and this should be remembered and celebrated.
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“Where are all the protest songs?” (Part I)
The unshakeable legacy of the music and politics of the 1960s
Contemporary musicians are often accused of being apolitical. Most people who actually listen to contemporary popular music know that’s nonsense. So where does this view come from?
The exploration of this question was the driving force for the initial stage of my PhD thesis – which began life as a loose set of ideas about the links between politics and popular music and finished up as Politics in a different key: Popular music and changing modes of political participation.
Politics in a different key 